


When I was in love with you

by wanttobeatree



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Gen, Post-X-Men: Days of Future Past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 18:58:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19068694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanttobeatree/pseuds/wanttobeatree
Summary: There Erik stands, at the foot of the steps that lead up to the entrance, looking out across the overgrown driveway. His back is to the door, but he half-turns at the sound of it swinging open.“Hello, Charles,” he says over his shoulder.





	When I was in love with you

**Author's Note:**

> This sat half-finished for five years, until I dusted it off and bashed out a few more paragraphs. Title from A.E. Housman's _A Shropshire Lad._

XVIII.  
Oh, when I was in love with you,  
Then I was clean and brave,  
And miles around the wonder grew  
How well did I behave. 

And now the fancy passes by,  
And nothing will remain,  
And miles around they’ll say that I  
Am quite myself again.

 

*

 

When Charles opens his eyes, he knows.

It’s still very early and it’s still very dark, and the mansion is silent around him. He navigates his way from bed to chair in the pre-dawn half-light, tugging his dressing gown around his shoulders and rolling himself softly out into the corridor. He lets his mind drift out ahead of him to touch on Hank’s thoughts and nudge him into deeper dreams; as with any neglected muscle, his telepathy needs stretching, just as his hands are rebuilding their calluses, his shoulders still aching at the end of a long day. 

The elevator seems to take an eternity to reach the ground floor. Perhaps it too is out of practice. 

If he could just have the serum for an hour a day, if he could take the stairs two at a time and be truly alone in his head for only one hour a day – He grips the arms of his chair and breathes in and out slowly, until the elevator comes to a halt and the doors slide open onto the dark entrance hall. Where the light falls on the floor tiles it is still silvery with the stars and moon, but through the windows there’s the greenish hint of near-dawn. 

Whenever he sneaks through the house alone in the dark like this, he always thinks of Raven. He had believed as a child, giddy with the relief of no longer being so alone, that he must have been given his gift in preparation for that night; so that when she finally came to him, he would hear her alien thoughts and wake up in time to meet her. He had nightmares in which he slept too soundly and their paths never crossed again.

If he had the serum, perhaps he would have slept through this.

Charles can feel him now.

He focuses on Hank, instead, over his head. He is deeply asleep by now, and a quick skim of his mind shows Charles the pleasant nonsense that he dreams. He is on a cruise ship with the cast of Days of Our Lives, and the ocean is made of Jell-O. 

_You should go for a swim_ , Charles urges from the fuzzy outer edges of Hank’s dream, while his hand grips the doorknob.

_Really?_ the dream of Hank says. _Do you think so?_

_Oh, I most certainly do._

And he pulls open the front door.

There Erik stands, at the foot of the steps that lead up to the entrance, looking out across the overgrown driveway. His back is to the door, but he half-turns at the sound of it swinging open.

“Hello, Charles,” he says over his shoulder. “Mind if I...?”

Without waiting for an answer – without even truly asking the question – he motions up at the entrance light with a lazy flick of his fingers; the filament sparks and the bulb comes to life, lighting up them both in its sulphurous glow. Erik smiles thinly up at him. He is dressed in his armour, but without gloves or cape or helmet, so that Charles’ always roaming mind can feel the soft, familiar background hum of Erik’s thoughts before he reins himself in. He feels no malice there.

It is deliberate of course – a costume that is not fully Magneto, nor quite the Erik Charles once knew. But in the light, he can see how tired this Erik is. There are deep bags under his eyes, and his face, tilted up to the light to take in the sight of Charles, looks paler than even ten years of solitary confinement left it. Charles probably looks no better, he supposes.

“What do you want, Erik?” he says, at last, once the silence has stretched out too long between them.

“To catch up with an old friend?”

“No,” Charles says. “Let’s try that again, shall we? What do you want, Erik?”

“Reconnaissance.”

“I do hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re doing a bloody poor job of it.”

Erik shrugs languorously. He cracks another thin smile, his face devoid of humour. “We want to know your intentions. I thought you might take more kindly to an open enquiry than to outright spying.”

“We?”

“You must have known our people would join me, after the broadcast.” Erik looks around himself again, taking in the weeds and neglect and the peeling paint on the front doors. “No doubt you will rebuild your cohort, too... eventually.”

“There seemed little point maintaining the place,” Charles murmurs, “once there was nobody left to admire it. We plan to renovate.”

“For the school?”

“Done properly, this time.” 

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Erik takes a step back, craning his neck to look up at the front of the mansion. His bedroom was just down the hall from Charles’ own and Charles can feel the rush of recognition that pervades Erik's mind when he spots the window. It envelops them both, a sensation carefully devoid of all emotion, neither positive nor negative in association; simply – present. Erik must have been practicing how to blank his emotions in preparation for this trip.

For the first year after Erik and Raven left him, Charles had kept their rooms untouched, as though at any moment they might have returned and slipped seamlessly back into the spaces they had vacated. Until finally Erik’s face showed up next to Kennedy’s on that breaking news bulletin and Charles got rip-roaring drunk and tore down everything of Erik’s he could lay his hands on. 

“I threw it all in the garbage,” he snaps. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

“If,” Erik echoes, still gazing up at the facade as he lifts his foot to the first step and starts the climb.

Charles backs away just barely, and for just a moment, before he catches himself and repositions his chair more firmly in the threshold. He is almost certain that Erik won’t hurt him here – not like this, on the steps of what had been their home; at least, not without some higher purpose or vital cause.

He says, “I truly meant it when I said I don’t want to touch your thoughts again.”

“In Washington, you did.”

“In Washington, I had to move the stadium you’d dropped on my head, you might recall.”

“I wasn’t aiming for you,” Erik says.

“Oh, Erik, you never are, are you? And yet here I sit.” 

Erik flinches on the top step. The careful blandness he projects fractures for a brief second. Despite his own words, Charles can’t keep himself from touching for an even briefer second on the deep regret that creeps through the cracks. There is something heady in it: in the knowledge that he can still make Erik _feel_. Magneto surely must have no regrets.

He pulls himself back from the rush of feeling. Even then, he can sense the moment when Erik blanks his mind again, his face smoothing out the micro-expressions Charles hadn’t even fully realised were there until they are gone: a downward curl to the lips; a wrinkle of the brow; something in the eyes, perhaps.

“Please stay away from the school,” Charles says softly.

“Is that an order?”

“Let us call it a request. Between – old friends. You were right, you know. I turned my back on our people, I abandoned the cause, I allowed things to... fall away from me. I promise you, I will never turn my back on a mutant in need again. In return, please promise me this. Stay away. Let the children grow up in peace.”

“You would have them grow up blind?”

“I would have them grow up as _children_. If you deny them that, you’ll be no better than Shaw.”

Erik flinches again, his head snapping to the side as though Charles had dealt him a physical blow. His jaw clenches. He looks furious. Charles wants, for a moment, to have another blazing row; to make Erik even angrier. Let the damn plane crash this time and see what shapes crawl out of the wreckage.

“You are,” he says, instead. “Erik, you are better than Shaw.”

His face still turned away from Charles, Erik says, “And what will you tell them, when the humans are breaking down these doors with fire and pitchforks? What will you tell your children when the humans come to round them up?”

“I won’t let things come to that.”

“You think because we _might_ have altered just one possible future, humanity won’t seek to end us in one thousand other ways?” Erik scoffs, looking at Charles out of the corner of his eye. A triumphant smirk plays across his lips, as if he has already won. “You always were naive, Charles.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t ripped up a stadium, sabotaged the Sentinels and threatened to kill the President on national television, we’d have a few less possible futures to worry about,” Charles snaps back.

Erik turns very slowly to face him. 

The light flickers on and off, the metal fixture twisting around the bulb, and the doorknob crumples beneath Charles’ fingers as Erik draws himself up to his full height, which seems a lot taller now than Charles remembers. He still isn’t quite used to always having to look up at people now; to craning his neck back and being talked down to; to people avoiding his eyes. Erik, at least, does not avoid his eyes.

The lightbulb flares brightly one last time before exploding in a shower of sparks and glass, and Charles feels his wheelchair start to shake beneath him.

“Enough!” he shouts.

Everything freezes. Breathing in and out through his nose hard enough that Charles can hear it, Erik has the decency to look embarrassed, though no less furious. He glares at the doorknob until it smooths gently back into its original shape.

“You could have stopped me,” he snaps.

“I’d rather you stop yourself.”

Erik keeps glaring down at the doorknob. It twitches and shivers under his gaze. It’s warm to the touch, as though it were an extension of Erik in Charles’ hand. Charles can feel Hank stirring overhead, no doubt roused by the familiar creak of distressed metal. He drops his hand from the doorknob.

“Coming here was a mistake,” Erik says.

“Then, by all means, piss off.”

Erik nods and turns and strides back down the steps, but at the bottom step he falters. He looks back up at Charles. In the fading moonlight, his face seems unfamiliar. The shadows change the shape of it.

“Logan said that in his time we had united,” Erik says. “After you let me go in Washington, I had thought... But clearly I thought wrong. I can see no future in which we stand together.”

“If it’s happened before, it could happen again.”

Erik’s expression flickers briefly. In the darkness, it takes Charles a moment to recognise it for what it is: a faint, bitter smile.

“Ever the optimist, Charles.”

“Someone has to be.”

They stare at each other across the threshold, the stairs, the broken glass between them. Overhead, the sky is growing lighter and one solitary bloody bird begins to sing. Charles is so tired – for ten years, he has been so tired.

“I will leave your school alone,” Erik says at last.

“Thank you,” Charles says.

Erik nods. He lingers for one second longer, his jaw working, before he turns on his heel and walks back down the driveway. Charles doesn't want to watch him go, but his mind reaches out after him anyway, almost involuntary, like a hand stretching out into the air to grasp at something - anything. He feels, just barely, nothing but cold determination, as solid as steel, before he can snatch his hand away. Erik's footsteps stutter to a halt for a second, then pick up again.

Digging the heels of his hands into his eyes, Charles listens until the footsteps have faded away. He will need to ask Hank to sweep up the glass and to fetch the stepladder out of whatever dusty corner it's languishing in and replace the broken light bulb. 

Another bird joins in the dawn chorus, and then another, until it is a full-blown symphony. When Charles drops his hands and opens his eyes, Erik is gone and the sun is rising once again on a new day. Time marches on, doesn't it – days upon days, years upon years. Like sand through one's fingers.

“Right then,” Charles says.

He closes the door.


End file.
